For people invested in the largest potential dam removal in U.S. history, PacifiCorp has been dragging its feet long enough.
On Tuesday afternoon, just over a month after the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission threw the future of the Klamath Hydroelectric Settlement Agreement into limbo, Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) held a virtual forum on the declining health of the Klamath River and its fisheries.
It was part testimony from tribal leaders on the cultural loss of salmon, part roundup of the science done on salmonid populations in the river and part grilling of PacifiCorp on why it has delayed moving forward with the removal.
Huffman’s opening remarks connected the situation on the Klamath to the nation’s reckoning with its racist past, arguing that the dams only helped to develop the area at the expense of its Indigenous peoples. He painted dwindling salmon populations, which had traditionally sustained Native Americans living along the river since time immemorial, as a racial injustice along with an environmental one.
“It’s not a closed chapter of history, and we’re still doing it,” Huffman said.
Two tribal chairmen — Joseph James of the Yurok Tribe and Buster Attebery of the Karuk Tribe — explained how reviving the river would help revive their communities, which were once some of the most well-off on the continent thanks to an abundance of natural resources like timber and fish. Colonization saw the near-elimination of those old-growth forests and the altering of those fish habitats.
“The river is dying,” James said. “It needs to be healed.”
Glen Spain, Northwest Regional Director for the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, spelled out the dramatic decline in salmon populations.
As of now, the river hosts only 5 to 15 percent of the fall Chinook runs it once did. Spring runs are virtually nonexistent. And Coho populations, listed under the Endangered Species Act, are at 1 to 2 percent of what they used to be.
Restoring the fishery, Spain said, would bring salmon back to their historical migratory routes that stretched from Florence, Ore., to Fort Bragg, Calif. Coastal communities along that zone have seen their salmon landings nearly disappear.
Scientists on the panel said the culprits for the catastrophic decline in river health are four dams: J.C. Boyle, Copco No. 1, Copco No. 2 and Iron Gate. They cut off more than 400 miles of salmon spawning habitat in tributaries along the Oregon-California border, form reservoirs that choke on toxic algae and concentrate a salmon parasite downriver.
Jacob Kann of Acquatic Ecosystem Sciences, LLC, who has done studies on algae impacts on suckers in Upper Klamath Lake, laid out a similar situation on the Klamath River.
The dams, which impound water to form reservoirs, essentially turn a fast-moving river into a lake, causing the cyanobacteria microcystis to bloom in the warmer, calmer waters. Concentrations of microcystin, a liver toxin produced by the tiny organisms, in these reservoirs regularly reach between 10,000 and 60,000 parts per billion. Public health warnings occur at 6 parts per billion.
And while humans can stay away from unhealthy water, fish have no choice. High levels of microcystin below the dams are linked to salmon stress and mortality, and Kann said studies have shown that those conditions wouldn’t exist without the dams.
“Dam removal is really the only functional way to solve this issue,” he said.
Microcystin isn’t the only fish ailment.
Dr. Jerri Bartholomew, director of the J.L. Fryer Salmon Disease Laboratory at Oregon State University, said both juvenile and adult salmon encounter a host of pathogens during their time in the river. Ceratonova shasta, a gut parasite common in drought-afflicted waterways, infects salmon across the Pacific Northwest.
“But its effects in the Klamath have been the most dramatic,” Bartholomew said.
Bartholomew found that dams block upstream tributaries and allow nutrients to collect in their reservoirs, which concentrates the parasite along the river’s main stem in greater densities. And because salmon can’t escape to smaller tributaries where C. shasta can’t survive, the parasite overruns their communities.
While Scott Bolton, senior vice president for external affairs and customer solutions for Pacific Power (PacifiCorp’s moniker in Oregon, northern California and southern Washington), didn’t dispute the science or impacts of the ailing river on its communities. Instead, he brought up PacifiCorp’s economic concerns given the recent FERC decision.
PacifiCorp operates the dams on a 1954 license, which has been automatically renewed on a yearly basis since it expired in 2006.
The utility applied for relicensing through FERC in 2004 and received an Environmental Impact Statement in 2007 that would’ve required an expensive retrofit of the dams in order to account for their impact on fish populations.
The settlement agreement provided a pathway for PacifiCorp to rid itself of the dams, ultimately considered toxic assets, by transferring their license to the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, which would then dismantle the structures.
Per the agreement, PacifiCorp agreed to contribute $200 million to the removal project, raised through a surcharge to its California and Oregon customers.
The state of California would cover the rest of the removal bill, and the utility’s contributions were capped at that $200 million. In July, FERC denied PacifiCorp’s request to surrender its licenses to KRRC, saying that instead the two entities would be co-licensees. In effect, that order keeps PacifiCorp on the hook for unforeseen costs and liabilities that may be associated with the removal.
“FERC changed the deal we have all worked so hard for,” Bolton said.
Though to what extent the decision altered things changes, depending on who you ask.
Bolton said PacifiCorp being held liable for costs beyond the $200 million cap set forth in the KHSA requires them to revisit the deal with the other signatories. The utility is beholden to public utility commissions in the six states where it does business, and those regulators had to OK the agreement based on the perceived costs to PacifiCorp’s customers. If those costs increase, PacifiCorp may end up in hot water with those commissions. The morning of the forum, they received a letter from Utah Governor Gary Herbert concerned that, given the co-license setup, additional costs associated with the dam removal “would unfairly and disproportionately impact Utah electricity customers.”
But Huffman rebutted Bolton’s concerns, saying it’s highly unlikely that the removal operation will end up costing more than what was laid out in the agreement—and that retrofitting the dams through a separate relicensing process will cost PacifiCorp far more without any government assistance.
He and other politicians present floated the idea that the utility was keeping the dams on life support through 1-year license renewals since 2004 while not making a concrete enough commitment to their removal.
“This is becoming, by default, the new status quo,” he said.
Bolton couldn’t say when PacifiCorp would be able to recommit to the removal, specifically given the FERC curveball. But he did indicate that the utility intends to avoid a costly relicensing scheme. He also mentioned that the settlement agreement allows parties six months to negotiate around obstacles that arise and that those negotiations began immediately following the FERC decision last month.
Still, concerned that every moment of delay results in the worsening health of the Klamath River, politicians urged PacifiCorp (and Warren Buffett, who owns PacifiCorp’s parent company Berkshire Hathaway Energy) to figure out a way to make the deal work as soon as possible. Huffman announced that he will introduce federal legislation in the coming days to that end.
Perhaps the most telling moment of the forum came when California state senator Mike McGuire addressed Bolton concerning the various settlement parties’ motivations for entering into the KHSA.
“Yours is economics,” McGuire said. “Ours is on the human suffering and the environmental degradation that we’ve seen.”
